The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a major multi-ethnic empire which dominated large parts of Central Europe and the Balkans between its creation in 1867 and its collapse in 1918. For almost all of this period it was ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph I. The empire emerged out of the Austrian Empire which by the middle of the nineteenth century had grown into such a multi-ethnic state that it could not resist calls for greater representation by minority groups, eventually acknowledging the power of the Hungarian people within it by restructuring into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and granting it independence in internal affairs and a joint administration of foreign affairs.[1] It lasted for just over half a century before collapsing at the end of the First World War. This was a period of very considerable economic growth and change in the empire, as well as rapid population increases, all factors which led to mass emigration from Austria-Hungary. Several million people left the country, a huge chunk of which headed to the United States from the late 1870s onwards. As such, the expansion of the Austrian, Hungarian and Polish communities within America can be largely traced to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[2]
Austro-Hungarian Empire chronology of events
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Few of Europe’s great powers have a history which is as synonymous with one family as does Austria. It emerged as the dynastic estate of the House of Habsburg in the High Middle Ages, before becoming a major power in Central Europe with the succession of Ferdinand I as King of Hungary and Bohemia in 1526. In the second half of the eighteenth century Austria expanded yet again when it began acquiring new territories at the expense of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and acquired large parts of southern and western Poland and western Ukraine as part of the three partitions of Poland which it engaged in with Prussia and Russia. The Austrian state had grown to such an extent as a result that in 1804 Francis II proclaimed himself emperor of a new Austrian Empire as the old Holy Roman Empire came to an end.[3] This, however, would only last for just over sixty years, as there was constant agitating by the various non-Austrian ethnic groups who made up the bulk of the empire’s population for greater representation and power within the state. The result, in 1867, was the declaration that the Austrian Empire would now become the Austro-Hungarian Empire so as to acknowledge the contribution the Hungarians had made to the state since the sixteenth century.[4]
The period over the next half a century that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would exist for was an age of pronounced change in the lands of the empire. The territory which was ruled from Vienna had been relatively backwards in its economic development for decades, with the industrialization that had occurred in Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe since the 1770s barely impacting on the lands of the Austrian Empire. This was changing rapidly from the 1860s onwards as the Austro-Hungarian Empire came into being and the empire experienced some of the highest economic growth rates and industrialization occurring anywhere in Europe during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.[5] In tandem, the population of the Habsburg lands had swelled from approximately 23 million people in 1800 to some 36 million by 1870, reaching nearly 50 million by the early 1910s. The twin forces of industrialization and population growth put growing pressure on the empire’s ability to maintain so many people and emigration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire grew exponentially as a result in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the 1910s.[6]
Extent of migration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Millions of people left the empire during this period. Although some departed for other parts of Europe or for South America, where many ethnic Germans had settled in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, the overwhelming majority of the migrants who left the Austro-Hungarian Empire headed for North America. It is believed that 3.5 million people who entered the United States between 1876 and 1910 came from the lands of the Habsburg monarchy.[7]
It is difficult to assess exactly what ethnic groups these 3.5 million people were made up of as they were registered officially as being Austro-Hungarians, a designation which could include Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, Czechs, Slovenes and several other minority groups living within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet it was clearly a disparate group. For instance, there were over three million Polish-Americans in the United States by the outbreak of the First World War. While many of these had come from the Polish lands of Prussia and the German Empire which succeeded it or from the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands had also migrated from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[8]
Demographic impact of emigration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire
The demographic impact of this emigration was felt most strongly in the United States. For instance, there by the middle of the nineteenth century were just around 2,700 Hungarians living in the whole of the United States. Several hundred thousand migrated there between 1867 and 1914, establishing the basis for the large Hungarian-American community today, which is variously estimated to comprise between 1.4 and 4 million Americans. These Hungarians settled in very large numbers in the Ohio region, particularly within and around the city of Cleveland which for a time became known as the American Debrecen, so named after the second largest city in Hungary.[9]
Similar stories can be related of the demographic impact of other ethnic groups originating out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There are, for example, nearly a million Austrian-Americans today, many of them being descendants of families of Austrians who settled in large numbers in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey and Ohio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tens of thousands of ethnic Czechs and Croats also arrived to the eastern ports of the United States during this period, with the former group settling in large numbers in Chicago, while New Orleans became a fulcrum for Croat-Americans.[10]
Yet all of these were eclipsed by the settlement of Poles, many of them from Austria-Hungary, in the United States during this period. There were half a million Poles in the US by 1880 and this figure doubled to one million in 1890 and did so again to two million by 1900. Huge numbers of these settled in emerging industrial cities along what is now the Rust Belt from Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland westwards through West Virginia and Ohio and into Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. As they did the Polish-American community acquired large roots in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Chicago.[11]
Search for Austro-Hungarian ancestors in the United States
See also
Explore more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Austria-Hungary, Roman Catholic Indexes, 1612-1966 record collection on MyHeritage
- Austria, Births and Baptisms, 1651-1940 record collection on MyHeritage
- United States, New York, Immigration from Austria, Poland and Galicia, 1890-1891 from JewishGen record collection on MyHeritage
- Hungary Catholic Church Records, 1636-1895 record collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Polish Family History at the MyHeritage blog
- Tracing Your European Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Beginning Polish Genealogy at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Using MyHeritage to research Polish family history and to find living relatives in Poland at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- What's New in Austrian and Czech Jewish Genealogy at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Franz Josef I. WWI Biographical Dictionary. Brigham Young University Library
- ↑ AUSTRIA-HUNGARY BEFORE WORLD WAR I. Alpha History
- ↑ Holy Roman Empire. World History Encyclopedia
- ↑ The Dual Monarchy: two states in a single empire. The World of the Habsburgs
- ↑ Economic Development in the Nineteenth-Century Habsburg Empire. Cambridge University Press
- ↑ Population of the Major European Countries in the 19th Century
- ↑ Austrians and American Business. Austrian Embassy Washington
- ↑ Aleksander Gieysztor, et al. (eds), History of Poland, trans. by Krystyna Cękalska, et al. (Warsaw, 1968), p. 585.
- ↑ Hungarians. Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
- ↑ Croatians in Southeastern Louisiana: Overview. Folklife in Louisiana
- ↑ Pacyga, DominicPolish Immigration and the American Working Class. American History